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| Your Family's 100 Year Plan Part III |
Clashing Cousins
Michelle Seaton
02/01/2005
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One of my cousins is in prison. Another has been in and out of drug rehab for 15 years. A third cousin lives in Washington, D.C., and the only contact we have had since childhood was when we nodded hello to each other at a funeral a few years ago. Still another cousin is completely estranged from the family. Among my second cousins, I like the two whom I have met, and I hear gossip about two others. The rest of them I cannot even name.
All of these people belong to the fourth generation of my family, and over the next three decades, most will become my business partners.
 | | FRED SEATON and his brother followed in their father’s footsteps, buying
news papers. The three eventually formed a media empire. Their descendants
now face a myriad of family and business issues. |
The only thing that unites us is the legacy that began with our great-grandfather, Faye Seaton, who moved to Manhattan, Kan., in a business decision to improve the family fortune.I have never done one thing to earn or deserve this money, yet the checks continue to arrive. I have come to expect them, although I know it is the definition of entitlement to do so. To be honest, it is not a lot of money; the annual total nearly covers tuition for my son’s preschool. Yet these checks bind me to my brother, my cousins, my aunts and my father. They bind me further to my father’s cousins and their children and to a future in which I will attend annual family stockholder meetings with people I hardly know, affirming or challenging decisions that affect those checks on which I have grown to depend.
My great-grandfather, who died in the early 1950s, was not interested in creating a complex family dynasty when he purchased the Manhattan Mercury. He wanted simply to own and operate his newspaper and eventually hand it down to his two sons, both of whom worked for him while they attended high school and college. Faye’s oldest son, Fred, my grandfather, had a consuming ambition to run his own newspaper and pressured Faye to buy one for him. When Faye refused, Fred quit his job at the Mercury and ran away to Mexico for a few months, until his father relented and bought him the Tribune in Hastings, Neb., in 1937. At age 28, Fred became one of the youngest publishers in the country.
Both newspapers proved successful, and Fred and his brother, R.M., used the revenues from them to acquire several more newspapers, over Faye’s objections. They bought a couple of radio stations, and finally a license to operate a television station, which Fred built and staffed from scratch. Although a few properties have been bought and sold in recent years, the company’s holdings remain similar to what they were in the early 1970s, when Fred and R.M. were still in charge. It is now what it was then: a moderate-size business that generates ample revenue.
Faye and his two sons split their ownership interest in each individual property into shares of stock. Under this system, one of them owned the majority share of a property, while the other two had a minority interest, thus giving the manager of each business the ability to make decisions while loosely connecting each property to the whole. Unfortunately, however, this scheme also creates an odd class system in which some stockholders earn strong revenues from successful businesses, while others own shares of properties that do not earn money.
Fred and R.M. created rules for buying and selling these closely held shares in order to control the balance of stock between their two branches of the family and determine who could buy what stock and when. I do not fully understand the complex set of rules yet, but my father has started to explain them to me, because someday I will need to know. Few members of the fourth generation attend the annual stockholder’s meeting held each spring. Those of us who own a small amount of stock sign proxy statements so that our parents can vote our shares. After each meeting, my father fills me in on who argued, who stayed silent, who got drunk, who was ridiculed. My cousins and second cousins must be hearing these same stories filtered through their parents. It is possible that each of us will come to the family table schooled only in the biases of our parents. In our family business, everything tends to run smoothly until someone dies. When my grandfather, Fred, died in January 1974, his will gave half of his stock to his widow and split the rest of his shares evenly among his children. Although he knew that his wife, Gladys, and his brother, R.M., did not like each other, Fred probably had no idea that my grandmother hoped to run his half of the business independent of R.M.
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